Someone digging through a thick instruction manual to use a simple consumer app
Make This ClearerBEHIND THE BIT

No, your mum should not need a manual

What consumer apps can learn from explaining nothing.

THE USEFUL BIT · 4 MIN READ

The best consumer apps are used by people who never read a help page. Not because those people are technical, but because the app never needed them to be. Every choice was already made, and the one choice left was obvious.

Most business software takes the opposite approach: options for everything, so nothing has to be decided upfront by whoever built it. The cost lands on the person using it, and quietly on whoever has to explain it to them.

A tool that needs a manual before someone's mum can use it has not been finished. It has been handed over early, with the hard decisions still unmade.

BORROW THIS
The three-question clarity test

Could a first-time user finish the task without asking anyone? Is the next step ever unclear? Would removing an option make the screen better, not worse?

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